A Postmodernist's Hansel and Gretel
by Rocketfox
Summary: Ever wondered what 'Hansel and Gretel' was REALLY about? Certain there were some socio-political connotations or Freudian innuendo in that gingerbread house? (For all high school students studying Postmodernism and not understanding a word of it...)


Once upon a time, there was a brother and sister by the name of Hansel and Gretel. Remember this, because these archetypically blonde-haired, blue- eyed, well-behaved children become our protagonists and the hero figures, excluding an adult audience. They lived happily impoverished, without a matriarchal figure (their bachelor father challenging the constructs of the nuclear family and its values) and without mythological figures to disturb the spirituality and lack thereof in their consumerist lives.  
  
The father, obviously noting my earlier contradiction that the family was happy without money and then almost immediately labeling them consumerists, gave into Capitalist influence and married a wealthy woman who dominated him and forced a passive role onto him, causing great gender confusion. Realizing that not only was she breaking female stereotype, she was also a stepmother and therefore evil, so she began to plot sweet Hansel and Gretel's disappearance.  
  
"I shall lure the nasty little things into the forest," she cackled to her husband, her abhorrence to our young protagonists obviously a manifestation of her abhorrence to her femininity, and alienating herself from the audience's empathy. "And I shall abandon them. The blighters will get lost and we shall live a career-driven, childless lifestyle that is shocking to today's eighteen-century complacencies, but I'm sure it will be acceptable and rather normal in the future."  
  
Hansel, establishing his masculine role as the leaders of the siblings, overheard all of this and relayed it to his submissive sister.  
  
"What are we do?" Gretel simpered, frightened for the loss of the patriarch on which she and Hansel were dependent in their fight against Capitalism.  
  
"Never fear, sister!" said Hansel in a heroic fashion. "We must protect our old-fashioned, insular, misogynistic beliefs! When Stepmother invites us into the forest with her, I shall use the elements of the forest - a representation of nature and its rejection of materialism - to thwart her wretched plan. I shall drop stone by stone behind me as we walk, then when we are lost, we shall follow the trail of stones back home."  
  
And as all fairytales go, the very next day the stepmother asked the Hansel and Gretel if they would like to join her in the forest for a picnic. Tempted not by their stepmother's loving and motherly manner, but by their inherent consumerist, Hansel gathered a pocketful of stones and off the children went. They feasted feverishly on the food prepared by their stepmother (if she had really wanted to rid of Hansel and Gretel, she should have done a Snow White and poisoned them) and barely noticed when she slipped away. But when Hansel and Gretel did look up from the remnants of their pumpkin pies and toffied apples, they were not alarmed because heroic Hansel, in a display of male ingenuity and reluctance of postmodern conventionalities (excuse my oxymoron there), had dropped stone by stone behind him. He and Gretel smugly escaped this multiplicity of settings and were reunited with their still tragically effeminate father. Their stepmother's "wretched plan" had been foiled and she was most displeased that a small boy in juxtaposition of the traditional hero figure had done it.  
  
Yet she was not to be deterred. "I will lose those brats, I will!"  
  
And so the next day, the stepmother again asked Hansel and Gretel for a fatal forest picnic, and this time, Hansel told Gretel to go gather some stones. But alas! Stones are a symbol of male virility and Gretel was only able to find a symbol of female domesticity and perversion of nature - a loaf of bread. In her naivete she thought, "I can just scatter breadcrumbs behind me as I walk. That should do it."  
  
But woe! In our protagonists' growing gluttony, neither noticed that the trail of breadcrumbs was pecked at by the crows in a very Gothic image and destroyed.  
  
"Alas! Woe! We are lost!" cried Hansel and Gretel. "Once again, female intuitiveness has failed! So now in the challenge of the hero construct we must wander the forest - fatigued, vulnerable, deprived of all paternal figures for comfort and protection, and great, gnawing hunger (oddly, as we had only just scoffed down the entire contents of a picnic basket)." The siblings traipsed through the forest; bemoaning their misfortune and how surprisingly nature had turned against them when they smelled the greatest smell ever smelt by their intended audience. Sweets! Hansel and Gretel were revived and followed the scent, dashing through the trees until they reached a clearing. And in that clearing, luring the children like Capitalist propaganda, there was a most playful and marketable cottage built of gingerbread and assorted confectionery.  
  
Hansel and Gretel stared up at this symbol of an American Dream House with wide, shining eyes and even wider stomachs, and in that very moment they too strayed from the philanthropic path of protagonists and rejoiced in this great materialistic discovery. Uncaring that this house was an illustration of neglect in nutritional and moral values, they began to break off portions of the gingerbread and sweets and energetically eat. But a conventionally innocuous old woman wearing a black cape appeared at the front door, watching Hansel and Gretel greedily consume her property with a calm curiosity.  
  
"Excuse me!" she called to them. "Are you hungry?"  
  
Hansel, shamed by her kindly, elderly voice and no apparent gender discrepancies, put down the candy-cane windowsill he was sucking. "Yes, we are. We are starving! And quite tired too."  
  
"Oh, I imagine so! The forest can be a perilous place. What brave children you must be!" said the old woman, smiling at them. "Why don't you two come inside? I can make you some supper, let you rest, and perhaps help you home. I live here all alone and it is so nice to have visitors, and rarely are they so pleasant."  
  
Hansel and Gretel perked up at this mention of material and emotional solace, recognizing at last the matriarchal figure that had been absent from their young lives, and raced inside. The door slammed shut behind them and the old woman immeadiately locked it not twice, but thrice, with that malevolent laugh that all wicked old witches in disguise possess.  
  
"Ha, ha, ha! I have tricked you, and the inherent id impulses of a Capitalist society exposed in this fairytale through the protagonists being but children!" she cried, revealing her true self as horribly disfigured, and masculine in the way she had chosen strength and candor over her subservient feminine self. "I am not a sweet old lady, but a witch and pagan symbol! See; look at my telltale black cape! And not just any witch. I am Germaine Greer!"  
  
"Radical late twentieth-century feminist?" shrieked Hansel and Gretel.  
  
"Why, that's worst than a witch!" Gretel added.  
  
"Ha, ha, ha!" Germaine said in a stereotypically evil tone. "Your brief blindness to your once carefree lifestyle has caused you death, and is reflected in my literal blindness - also a metaphorical blindness to my gender role. In a barbaric Gothic ritual that perhaps can be interpreted as penis envy, I'm going to enslave you, boy protagonist challenging hero paradigms, in this cottage of mine until you are plump enough, and then I'm going to eat you as all feminists do, except I'm not being figurative!"  
  
"No!" wailed the siblings. "Oh, the phallic connotations! Damn you, Freud!"  
  
But in their despair and dependence on a stable adult figure, there was nothing to be done. Germaine promptly locked Hansel into a boy-sized cage in an attempt of male subservience and the immoral reversal of traditional gender roles, as Gretel was forced to be Germaine's servant girl. "I, as the second feminist figure of this fairytale, realize the feminine force within you, girl protagonist. I shall however ignore your obvious unhappiness and continue to and enslave you in a cruel and unusual manner; and with my inability to even learn your names, the audience should identify that this is the exact same device used to alienate the stepmother character from their empathy earlier! Why change a classic (unless you're a high school student doing HSC English Extension)?"  
  
So the children were trapped. Every day, Gretel would clean and cook for Germaine in a parody of the pseudo-lesbian-feminist relationship, and Germaine would feed Hansel on unsold hardback copies of 'The Female Eunuch' and the castrated parts of male telemarketers who had tried to sell her stock. And every day, Germaine ordered Hansel to poke his finger through the bars of the cage so she could feel how fat he had gotten. Hansel, once again extemporizing with natural, did not poke his finger through the bars but a long, lean bone, which Germaine fingered with disappointment (and let us cheerfully ignore the stark phallic subtext here, we've all had a dirty little giggle about it and we can move on now).  
  
"Are you never to grow round and juicy for me?" she moaned. (And, yes, here too.) "It has been over a week! I can wait no longer! Go light the oven, girl protagonist! Tonight, we are having a glorious supper - a male meal, if you'll excuse the poor alliteration!" But Gretel, inspired by Germaine's androgynous character, decided to playfully challenge the hero figure construct of Hansel wearing the white hat and rescue them both from Germaine's unmanicured clutches. She secretly lit the oven and waited until it was red hot to ask Germaine for help.  
  
"I cannot work out how to light this oven. It's just not working. I think there is a piece of that Jehovah's Witness from Sunday night jamming it."  
  
"Ah, fiddlesticks!" Germaine snapped. "You're just too short and useless to reach the very back of the oven where the gas pipes are. However, in the fairytale tradition that I am so blind I cannot even see such an obvious plot point, I shall willingly climb as far as I can into this steaming oven to reassure your doubts." And so she did, and Gretel closed the oven door and trapped her inside, a repetition of Germaine's earlier deceived of our protagonists done to emphasize the importance of her comeuppance.  
  
"Et tu, Gretel?" Germaine screamed as the flames ate her up and she was destroyed in that Gothic symbol of Capitalist creation and depravity; as well as illustrating that female materialism and rejection of the conventional gender role leads to catastrophes such as kidnapping and cannibalism.  
  
With the feminist movement firmly put back for another three-hundred years or so, Gretel freed Hansel and they found their way to their simple home and their simple father, having learnt their lesson about gingerbread houses, greed and Gothic symbolism corrupting their trademark innocence. Their father greeted them with simple love that was devoid all material embellishments.  
  
"Hansel! Gretel! At last you have returned to me!" he beamed, drawing them into a very fatherly hug. "You have missed much. While you were missing, I conveniently gained my masculinity again and murdered your stepmother so you wouldn't have a pansy of a father anymore! The balance and the fairytale constructs are established once again! But I want you to remember that any kind of murder is wrong, unless you're the protagonist or related to. Then, it's the only moral solution."  
  
So the patriarchal power was restored, the feminists massacred, and the marketable happy ending was set up. And they all lived happily ever after. that is, until I got this assignment to rework this fairytale from a witty Postmodern perspective, and basically butchered poor Hansel and Gretel. Haven't the dears been through enough?  
  
No feminists were harmed in the creation of this short story. 


End file.
